


quantum entanglement

by deodand



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Crisis on Infinite Earths Crossover Event (CW DC TV Universe), F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-11
Updated: 2019-12-11
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:35:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21752332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deodand/pseuds/deodand
Summary: In exchange for his help in saving the multiverse, Lex makes a deal with the Monitor: when his role in the Crisis is over, he wants to play his sister in a game of chess.Lena realizes that Lex will never understand the stakes.Short post-Crisis fic.
Relationships: Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor
Comments: 4
Kudos: 137





	quantum entanglement

In exchange for his help in saving the multiverse, Lex makes a deal with the Monitor: when his role in the Crisis is over, he wants to play his sister in a game of chess.

The interdimensional plane between life and death has rules, you see – to balance particles and antiparticles, matter and antimatter, nothing can escape without something else taking its place. Unless Lex can trade fates with someone from the dimension of the living, he’ll be stuck in death for eternity. Normally the Monitor would never allow such an exchange, but to confront the Crisis, he grants Lex this price.

One minute Lena is on her balcony in the National City of the restored Earth-38; the next, she finds herself in the blackness of interstellar night – a void but for a gray platform, a chess board, and her brother. Then the Luthor siblings go head to head in a psychological and intellectual duel, Lex taunting Lena with his schemes to harm the world and the people Lena still loves, despite herself, when she loses. Lena wonders if here in the gloom, Lex is finally beyond her pity.

In the end, she reaches for her remaining white knight to seal a sacrificial checkmate. As she extends her hand, she looks on Lex for what she thinks is the last time; but Lex underestimated his sister once, and now he knows better. He reveals his last resort: power drawn from the Book of Destiny that will allow him to utterly destroy Supergirl – to destroy Kara Danvers – with a dark blow from this realm of oblivion.

He gives Lena a choice: claim victory and return home, but lose Kara; or surrender, and in return for the mortal power over Kara’s safety, take his place for all eternity in the zone between worlds.

Lena barely breathes before her hand reaches out to sweep her own king from the board.

Lex vanishes, and not for the first time, Lena is utterly alone.

But as she slowly picks her king up off the ground, Lena knows there’s something Lex hasn’t considered. In all her investigation into the mysteries of the universe, there’s something even she’s never been able to explain: the way she and Kara are aligned, entangled – alike in valence and direction across space, across time…across the distance between life and death.

As she sits in the growing darkness, she smiles. Between Lena and Kara, there is a connection that someone like Lex could never understand. There is a part of her that is bright, and vital, and will always anchor her to her true place in the world. That part of her is Kara, and Kara will bring her home.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on tumblr @luthessa :)


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